The Techstars Startup Weekend Maldives – Womens Edition is to be commenced on 4th May and will go until 6th May 2018, organized by the Techstars Community Leaders in the Maldives, supported by Allied Insurance Company of the Maldives Pvt Ltd, Male’ Aerated Water Company (MAWC), ALIA Investments Pvt Ltd and UNDP Youth Co:lab. Techstars Startup Weekend is a 54-hour weekend event, during which groups of developers, business managers, startup enthusiasts, marketing gurus, graphic designers and more pitch ideas for new startup companies, form teams around those ideas, and work to develop a working prototype, demo, or presentation by Sunday evening.
In case you are unfamiliar with Startup Weekend and Techstars – the former is a global network of passionate entrepreneurs and leaders (www.startupweekend.org) aimed towards creating a highly motivating weekend filled with enthusiastic, smart and passionate people assembled under one roof with a single motive, i.e., to assist in creating or funding the next best startup. Startup Weekend hosts entrepreneurs to build startups in more than 1,000 events per year in 150+ countries.
Techstars is a worldwide network that helps entrepreneurs succeed. Through the Techstars Worldwide Entrepreneur Network, founders and their teams connect with other entrepreneurs, experts, mentors, alumni, investors, community leaders and corporate partners who will help their companies grow and allow entrepreneurs to accelerate the pace of innovation and do more faster. Techstars Startup Weekend is where you go to accelerate your idea and Techstars Accelerator is where you go to accelerate your company.
Techstars Startup Weekend Maldives is an action-oriented, highly inspirational and experiential 54-hour program that brought together entrepeneurs, developers and experts from myriad industry sectors to come together to pitch an idea and launch a business, all in one weekend by turning ideas into reality.
Anurag Maloo, the Regional Manager for Techstars in South & Central Asia, who has experiences of building startup communities in South Asia said that, “Entrepreneurs are the leading drivers of prosperity, jobs and innovation, especially women entrepreneurs who bring particular sets of skills that not only set them apart from their male counterparts, but also lend themselves to being successful entrepreneurs. Without entrepreneurship, communities would cease to move forward within their local economies and in the world. There are 5 essential ingredients – talent, density, culture, capital and regulatory environment, working together to create an environment for ideas to thrive and foster successful entrepreneurial ecosystems in the Maldives.” Anurag believes that Maldives still has a long way to go but definitely it has a lot of potential.
Fathmath Neesha, the lead organizer of Startup Weekend Maldives, who is also a former participant of the first Techstars Startup Weekend in the Maldives, told us that, “The reason why we chose to do an edition for women was to provide potential women entrepreneurs the platform to discover their own potential as the future innovators of the country. During the first Techstars Startup Weekend Maldives, we noticed that there was a lack of women participation. So we wanted to provide that safe place for women to test out their ideas and show the world that Maldivian women are also as innovative as the men.”
Asra Naseem, one of the marketing mentors this year for the Startup Weekend Maldives Womens Edition said that, “Gatherings such as Startup Weekend helps young people to think about practical aspects of implementing an idea and form networks that would enable them to tackle some of these issues in entrepreneurship. A womens edition is essentially helpful to provide the emergence of women entrepreneurs in the country to perfect their skills”
It is a 54-hour event that puts aspiring entrepreneurs in direct contact with the sharpest business coaches, mentors, investors and panel of judges from the Industry and let them undertake an entrepreneurial life cycle journey by takings the highs and lows of it with proper guidance and mentorship. The local organizing team has been able to pull together some of the best names in the Maldives as mentors for the participants, who have experienced the entrepreneurial life cycle and could support them in further strengthening the business ideas of the participants and build a strong product at the end of the day.
The Techstars Startup Weekend is the first international initiative to support and nurture the growth of startups in Maldives. Maldives is the newest addition to Techstars Startup Weekend program, powered by Google for Entrepreneurs and it has been successfully run over 160 countries in last 10 years.
